Wednesday, January 6, 2010

The end of every year provides us an arbitrary but constant measure of what we've done. In this span, we've triumphed over X or failed to attend to Y. Imagining that the distinction of a year's time signifies anything special in itself is foolish. It's just a useful tool against which we may look at our behavior and say, "Yes—and I was too."

Last year I set myself a list of goals of Things I Want[ed] to Do When I Gr[ew] Up. I can say with absolute confidence and sincerity that I accomplished all of them without the slightest hesitancy or difficulty. This, however, presents its own set of problems.

After all, it's a man of meager talents who rests on his laurels, who looks at himself in the mirror and says, "The body—the hair—the eyes and smile—yes, these are all perfection writ obnoxiously large, a prominent human billboard of consumingly sexy that must drive others to resentful nausea," without once thinking, How can I make this insufferably sexier? It's a man with an only faintly lit inner life who can take pleasure in gifting a treasure chest of salvage filled with a shark to someone without thinking, Is there a way I can prank someone into being eaten by the shark?

These are new steps I must take — that we all, figuratively at least, must take on our own lest we stagnate and start to smell funny. To accomplish so much so readily and do nought else invites only some kind of circulatory disease, when what we need is the disease of more. Do more, eat more, stick more things of ours in more other things. This more I pledge. And more. Come with me.More Things I Want to Do When I Grow Up:I wanna taste cancer, have a full-cancer dinner. I want to gnaw on fucking tumors. Ohhh!!! Ohhhhhhhh!!!!!!! That's an adenocarcinom nom nom nom nom nom. It's malignificent.

I wanna fill someone's airbag with semen.

I want to waltz about some upscale mall with a name like Spring Valley Galleria, bearing a bandolier of Campbell's beef stock and spray obese people with a Super Soaker filled with gravy.

I wanna pay a bunch of nuns to crash a penguin exhibit and start fucking.

I want to put a goatse hologram on a hotel ceiling and rig a CD player and disco ball to the light switch so "Brick House" starts pumping as soon as you enter the room.

I want to build a lawn mural of lights that spell out "Fantastic!" and trip over them as the bulbs explode like the end of The Natural.

I want to have my own homemade baseball bat with letters scored into it reading, "Touch~a~Boy."

I want to be a girl, stay a skeletal 5-feet-none and 100 pounds, and even into my thirties and forties draw the same palsied-hand ink sketches of flowers like "Edward Gorey's tubercular daisy" onto the hand-made cards I send people for their birthday, dot my I's with some kind of runic drawing, send my best wishes in doggerel poetry and not only post-script the greeting with something about the healing power of "tea," but pepper my facebook updates with, "Need to curl up with some tea," and, "Wish this night was colder so I could tuck myself in with this tea," and generally slide into spinsterhood and solitary madness as the exact same talentless waif failure-nymph I was in high school — little realizing that the only reason anyone half-tolerated this behavior then was that 90% of the people I knew were guys who would have listened to old Hitler speeches in my room with the same vim with which they listened to the Indigo Girls if only there were still the same outside chance of getting laid for their troubles.

I wanna see that whole gangster movie from Home Alone. I bet it fucking sucks.

I want to run a parrot adoption agency that claims to find homes for old parrots whose owners have died and supplies new buyers with an owner history featuring elderly German immigrant couples, but really they'll all be birds I've bought and arrayed around my living room while bombarding them with recordings of Nazi speeches and quotations from the History Channel.

I want to go to a department store gift-wrap and hand them a condom and say, "I want this gift wrapped around the present. The gift is my penis, and it's for you."

I want to pay a bunch of immigrants of indeterminate ethnicity to approach a family in a Toyota Highlander and begin loading the top rack with woven baskets, boxes and chicken crates, stand on the Highlander's goofy-ass running board, hand the driver a wad of Riyals and then start beating on the roof and yelling, "Imshi! Imshi!"

I want to fix the warp core by just jamming a baby in there. The captain'd be all, "We've got to get the ship going! We're running out of time!" and I'll be all, "I'm tryin' to get these babies in there, I think they'll hold!" and the captain will totally think I'm solving things until some ensign from the engineering section sees what I'm doing and starts yelling hysterically and grabbing my arms and wailing because I'm just feeding a shitload of infants into the warp chamber, and the thing is, there's no reason not to think it'd work because babies are just matter.

I know a dude whose face looks exactly like the alien from "The Corbomite Maneuver" and every time I see him it's like the universe saying, "This is your payment for every time anyone tries to call you a nerd for knowing anything about Star Trek."

I want to find the Virgin Mary in a taquito.

I want to find a woman with alopecia and ask her if the linoleum matches the plaster.

I want to spend about a thousand dollars on some serious Tom Savini makeup, go to a Greek restaurant and push a Nike hightop with a Kuato baby in it onto the counter, simmering in its own little footspring of viscera, ask to speak to the manager, then grab my head as a wound on my crown re-erupts with blood and say, "UNNNNGHHH. My daughter wants to speak to you."

I want to capture a fox, put socks on it and release it in a daycare.

I want to bombard both sides of the McDLT at each other in the Large Hadron Collider to prove that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle actually determines which side stays hot.

I want to have a really sour candy in my mouth in front of a really pretty babe, but my face still looks calm and cool even though there's a really sour candy in it, 'cause I can handle it, baby. Ferrara Pan... Red Hots... Lemonheads... mouth full of 'em. But you'll never know. Wince about the eyes? That's me. That's Clint Eastwood. The Hot, The Sour, The Cinnamon. The Candied Josey Wales. The Gumslinger. This is what I am. Unload both channels of a rubber-band gun at my chest and watch as I take a dive. You've won... or have you??? Nope. I've taped Topps baseball cards of shitty utility-infielder players from the New York Mets all across my chest. I didn't feel a thing. Now who's scared? The rest of your life plays out like Westworld, only I'm the Yul Brenner robot with two Heath Ledger's-Joker smears of chocolate running from the corners of my mouth.

I wanna be inside Brittany Murphy. I don't care if I'm late.

I want to determine the ways in which the events of 2009 diverged from the events in Freejack, then find out who's responsible for altering the timeline.

I want to make a mercury-stabilized anti-aging vaccine and then dangle it at the end of a red licorice rope just out of Jenny McCarthy's reach, and every time she leaps for it, go "Whoop!" and yank it out of the way while giving her the Dikembe finger-wag.

I want to become a spotted tiger breeder. For the last fucking time, they are not leopards.

Next Thanksgiving I want to stuff a giant Butterball turkey with motor oil, stand at the head of a huge table filled with friends and family, cut into it and watch the ebon blood spew from the carcass as I yell, "The prophecy!" and run shrieking from the room only to be found later in the attic watching the Cowboys game and eating a bucket of Original Recipe.

I want Moira Kelly to catch me jerking off to The Cutting Edge.

I want the Goo Goo Dolls, Lady Gaga and The Go-Gos to tour together. But they can only play Kajagoogoo covers or they don't get paid. Also their checks are dispensed through the mouth of a large plastic robot baby.

I want to write an adapted screenplay of the novelization of the movie Star Trek: Nemesis, change the title and see how large the check I get to cash is.

I want to code a brand new version of the game Timecop where all you do is ticket Marty McFly as soon as he breaks 60 mph.

More pie.

I want to troll a feminism parade at a college by building a giant papier-mache cliff on a float and driving at least 50 straight remote-controlled cars off it while "Barbie Girl" plays on repeat, all over a banner reading, "STICKIN TOGETHER IS WHAT GOOD WAFFLES DO."

Wanna sneak into everyone's pantry like a poor-ass Santa and replace every Oreo with a Hydrox and a Post-It note readin', "Tighten your belt, motherfucker."

I want to kidnap a kid while he's in the middle of playing the game "Rampage," whisk him via imperceptible motion to the city of Detroit, and when he finishes his game, rip the curtains off the window and scream, "LOOK WHAT YOU DID, TIM. LOOK WHAT YOU DID."

I want to combine Mother's and Valentine's days to create MILF Day, on a scale larger than the one I'm already practicing in the house you grew up in.